An Englishman Visits the States

by Glenn N. Holliman

In this space, I often share insights by persons I have met in my life.  Last posting, was a review of the biography of Tom Price, an Australian statesman, who responded to the challenges of his time and place with productive good works.  His biographer, his great grand daughter, Stephanie McCarthy, did a marvelous job bringing his story to life.  If you have not read the previous post, click back and ponder how one's energy and focus can make a difference.  

Today's post is more of a long article one would find in the New Yorker or Harpers, so do not feel one must absorb it in one setting.  Terry Field writes often in this space.  He is an irrepressible Englishman who has built a home, a garden and a wine celler in Normandy, France.  This past January, he and his good wife, Fina, traveled to Florida and spent about a month.  As a businessman, Terry has often been to the United States.  Ever insightful and stimulating, he  records his latest impressions, observations and makes some comparisons with the United Kingdom. 

Reflections on a Visit to America by Terrance Field    

Having settled back into gentle but tired France, it seems sensible to reflect upon the lands visited and their peoples.

America always amazes, sometimes excites, occasionally disappoints.

But is always worth the experience. Florida is famous in England as being the home of bland, somnambulistic, usually antique and often unintelligent people living out their last days in a sort of dreamscape. Certainly, there are enormous numbers of people who seem to fit the description, and the gentle flatness of the countryside, the languorous pools of water that betray the building up of 'gated community' lands sufficiently above the water table -and hopefully the sea-level yet to come - to allow optimistic enjoyment in pleasant vistas of 'bungalow' living.

Without exception, when encountered, Americans of the Floridian variety showed brotherly (and sisterly) kindness and consideration. A cheery handshake and an engaging phrase left me feeling pleasantly warm and appreciated. The almost courtly good manners of the Americans is not contained to Florida, but seems to be ubiquitous. After a time I yearn for a hearty disregard, and possibly an expletive; you know, the sort readily distributed amongst the normal intercourse of the English when they are amongst each other.

'Can this be real?' one wonders, when confronted with the warm bath of polite consideration. Indeed, the manners seem to reflect the architecture.

Naples (the Floridian version, not the Italian) appears to be a sort of stage set. A kind of reference back to 

'The prisoner' and the bouncing water ball. (to 'get' this, please see British television, about forty years ago). All looks flimsy and almost cardboard-like. Until you strike the walls with an enquiring fist, only to find that they are made every bit as well as a public building in London, Paris or Berlin.

The overconfidence that led me to expect the cardboard would give way under the force of the blow is replaced with a numbing pain as I look to see if bones are broken, and if flesh is damaged. Nearly but not quite. A new respect for the three dimensional reality of America takes hold. Not only does America build to stupendous scale, and often simply for fun, but also with a solidity and permanence that makes any future decision to demolish and replace one of economic excess simply unknown in the antique world over the pond.

(At this point I am reminded of a moment in Liverpool in 1970, when I leaned against a wall of a Victorian end-terrace house, it duly gave way, and my arm disappeared into the void within.)

Further preconceptions are about to be bowled over. This is another visit that makes my ideas as fragile as skittles in a bowing alley.

The Tamiami Trail

We travel to Sarasota on the 'Tamiami Trail'. Fina asks what this means. Puffing myself up I tell her in all confidence that it is an ancient word taken from the Seminole Indians, used to identify the tracks worn into the boggy landscape during fishing and Alligator-trapping hunts. My squaw is duly impressed, but deflation awaits. The radio informs us, only a short while later that it is the 'Tampa -Miami road'. I decompress and wrinkle for the rest of the day.

Arriving in Sarasota, and having not 'looked up' the town, I am surprised to see that there is 'culture' here. An opera house; theatres in the plural, more than one symphony hall; a fine orchestra, an range of smaller scale classical musical offerings, and a patronage replete with fine careers in human form distributing creditable quantities of money to the higher functions of human expression.

What with jazz, folk, local stuff, etc, this town is a delight, and has fine beaches and an elegant 'corniche' replete with pleasant excess in the boat department. It even has a toy shop selling chickens that, upon squeezing, 'lay' eggs of a sort of gelatinous jello that leaves me rolling with laughter; not the sort of thing that politically correct Europe would allow its children to enjoy. (For them only the seriousness of 'permanent improvement', a touch like the Strength through Joy' movement).

Bit wait! There is more! A fine museum, (the Ringling), and with it a story of truly heroic self sacrifice by a wonderful self-made man who -literally - bankrupted himself (sauf his kind friends) to give such a gift to this hoped-for American Nice or Monaco.

Everywhere here I see the sinews of a muscular, honest, endeavouring society that scattered the joy and meaning of high culture for the pleasure and improvement of Americans considered entirely of one citizenry, and thus fully entitled to participate in the best that life can offer.

All it took was honest hard work. Yankee thrift. Tough integrity.

Then, in a return visit to the present, and its strangely mutated characteristics reminds me that all is not well.

Times have changed.

The soup of culture that the American swims in seems to reward almost everyone for almost anything in the school and college 'system'. That is the correct description; a 'system' that spews out hordes of the same; blandised, averaged, unremarkable, uncourageous, profoundly illiterate people, who, on multiple acquaintance seem incapable of using the languages that God gave them.

Just watch a film made in the thirties and forties and the contrast is stark; where actors spoke quickly and lucidly, with density of language, connection of ideas and completion of sentences, the present offering - both on screen and in real life - is characterised by lack of clarity, slogan-speech, no complexity of ideas, weak reasoning and no ability to dissect the arguments of others and generate a valuable riposte.

True, I meet intelligent educated people who are not so disadvantaged, but even there is exhibited a mortal terror of describing reality in robust terms and then dealing with it effectively and with style.

Why is this? What has happened in America?

I would suggest the following possibilities, that, taken together, explain in part the interpersonal desert now prevailing.

Firstly, like the worm which consumes its own brain when a pleasant piece of earth has been found in which to dwell, the broad mass of the Americans are rich beyond dreams and need not use language to battle for advantage; most are single-skill technical specialists who receive monthly currency credits entitling them to click a mouse to have all foods and other goods delivered to them. Why speak when the effort is superfluous.

Secondly, English there has been so reduced by its mongrelisation as to be inherently ugly and unsatisfying; to such a degree that even a Pole or Bulgarian who finds his life being spent in Philadelphia or Peoria recoils from using it when avoidable.

Thirdly, the means to use language are decaying within families, where books, literature, discourse, rhetoric, the pleasure of verbal combat has entirely disappeared. Add to this a thick layer cake of the worst and most degraded intercourse found on earth - courtesy of the American television system, and the direction of travel towards monosyllabic grunting is fixed.

As if to confirm this personally, I met some relatives I had not seen before, and was pleased to see their bodies fine and straight, but their minds imprisoned behind a wall of no language.

That a billionaire like T Rump can dominate with the use of only a tiny vocabulary, and a language bereft of wit, humour, colour, reflection and the joy of deprecation speaks of the disaster that is American non-communication.

One of the results? An incapacity to discuss complexity; to understand it; to overcome it. The politics of the cretin is only a step away.

And WHO likes to really discuss the state of the world in America? I met nobody willing and able to do so. I saw nobody willing and able to do so on the American channels I tuned to.

Here, I am not an Englishman with any sense of superiority, however, since I see exactly the same happening in my poor country. I am in the habit of attempting to discuss current affairs in England during my infrequent visits. The result is interesting; most shy away, some look as if I have made a smell, most refuse to respond or say something of such stupidity as to be beyond belief? Is this the same country that produced the levellers, the Puritan revolution, the Reform Acts, the wonder of nineteenth century pamphleteers, Aneuran Bevan, Keir Hardie, F. E. Smith, the Liberal Party, the list goes on and on.

My latest visit to Derbyshire produced a bizarre set of juxtaposed absurdities that mirrors exactly the problem I describe in America.

One pleasant lady - a 'Green' - attempted to tell my that there are only peaceful Muslims and dreadful Islamists. I asked if she head read the Koran. I also enquired if she was happier with the destruction of the countryside and slaughter of birds by application of solar panels and wind-vanes from horizon to horizon as the dreadful nuclear power plants she so despised are phased out.

She slunk away, clutching her bigotry like a dead child. Drenched in politically correct attitudes, she had lost that part of the brain able to reason. It had gone, to be replaced by a new growth in the cortex that responds peculiarly well to direction for the BBC.

British snobs sneer at Fox (News); at least there is variety there, say I. pity the poor British, with a thousand and one varieties of the same flavour in the political output of the BBC that informs the views (code for conditions) of 70% of the local inmate population.

At last an intelligent response!

I am in a picture framing shop in this pleasant but really grindingly poor town in the Derbyshire peaks when a fellow complains of the poor quality of a picture frame he has bought for his 'Madonna with the Big Boobies' as he calls them. This is enough for me; I venture an opinion on the frame; his wife agrees and we strike up a conversation about the new Puritanism and foul narrow-mindedness of contemporary English life.

He shows the picture - and indeed she is a fine dusky girl with quite magnificent breasts. He remarks that his friends are upset by her raw sexuality and nakedness. On the other side of the picture an artist of wroth has pained a quite different picture. His solution? A two way glass frame - one side to show the breasted one when he is 'en famille', the other turned to face outwards when the local bigots are around.

I venture to agree with his loathing of modern British life and thinking. I am invited to tea the next day, and find myself with my hosts in the parlour of the magnificent manor house of the village. This gentleman is High Tory, as is his wife; both are dwellers in London - Mayfair of course, with this as the weekend country retreat, together with a place in the best skiing resort in Europe, and of course a pile in the Caribbean.

Old money; I know it well. I have spend much of my life close to it, but have never had much at all of it. The worst of circumstances for an Englishman. Not to be endured.

Yet again I am compelled to experience the country that has shaped me like a horse-shoe under the anvil. It seems inescapable.

The peasantry, ubiquitous, silent, resentful, fearful, prudish now and knowing their place, contrasted in vivid colour with those accustomed to command, to direct the future, and, of course, entitled to opinions; thus with an obligation to express them.

    Terry chats with some non-bland Americans  whilst in Florida

SO what happens when I allow these patrician folk to know I have spend a month in Florida?

The predictable happens.

'SO bland! SO full of mindless Americans! Gods waiting room! How can you BEAR such a place?!?!?

At this point I am reassessed and found wanting as a companion. They detect an alien mind. Distance is established over the coffee and hot cross buns. He bustles off and announcing 'we are off for a cycle ride - SO nice to see you'.

They make arrangements to return to the London that does not care to know that people like me exist. Their parting shot is ' Of course we will leave the EU - we need to recover the direction of our country!!

By 'our country' they did not mean 'my' country. They meant theirs. E unum pluribus in Britannia est.

Why do these ramblings matter? Possibly because one could argue that a country needs to have a structure that gives it meaning, context, direction and worth-whileness. From that it follows that those superfluous to the structure need not live. as a part of that superfluity I know my place.

In England the aristocracy gave a steady hand and - in general - enlightened direction to a beautiful place where the agrarian world imposed the contentment and obligation of known place to its people. The development of its gentle democracy shaped to the landscape under this benign hand, and over great lengths of time.

The industrial and imperial period continued this in new circumstances; new money behaved like the old enlightened aristocracy. A continuing patrician sense of responsibility and high ideals helped to avoid the brute violence that predicated war and revolution in so much of Europe. but now that is over and gone and there is no structure; just a boiling cauldron of discontented mini-egos jostling for survival and pretending all the while that things are as before.

The dispensable superfluity of those outside the ancient social structures in part explains how the slaughter of the wars in Europe in the twentieth century could be endured and overcome by the populations; people busied themselves whilst suffering losses that they knew had no real social cost. Personal pain is private. It passed as time flowed. Duty and obligation, however, had been long accepted as eternal and enduring. Like rock. The dead were replaced by tractors; cheap memorials homogenised them for future marketing opportunities.

Britain is returning to a kind of  eighteenth century; post industrial, but now, unfortunately, possessed of a curious sub-group of disconnected people, who feel no mutuality of obligation, enjoying immense wealth and replete with the power of manipulation for personal advantage undertaken entirely without pity. 

I contrast this with the philanthropic community of achieving Americans, who give enormously to the betterment of their communities. In this group, the successful Jews should be recognised as offering outstanding generosity, as well as fine intellectual contributions to American life. That truth should be recognised. A small example of the newly corrupted British world - in that country over 90% of serious occupations go to the 9% who are educated via private means. The rest are padding, like the stuffing of a mattress.

So where is the connection with contemporary America?

Maybe not in the details but one social pattern seems to be strikingly similar in both societies.

In the United States, for the first time since its creation, it can be plausibly argued that the endless opportunities for personal and social enrichment are coming to an end. The exploitation of the most capacious continent on earth has now become strained; resources are not without limit, and the life of the individual is more precarious. Capital is not American but indeterminate in character, and this has come as a body blow to a naive polity after 2007. Capital can leave and go to China; it can impoverish as it enriches, and all in America. From sea to shining sea.

How do modern Americans react to these reduced circumstances? From what I saw, they hope for the future, and still applaud the rich who build thousands of homes like palaces on the waterfronts of Florida's best bays, whilst knowing that they may be inundated in a few decades as the waters rise inexorably. When I point this out, my fellow tourists laugh and say ' Oh they will just walk away from them and build someplace else!'

These pleasant folk are not outraged. They are not incensed at the absurdity of it all. They are not just de-politicised, they are devoid of any sense of the ironies of life. They seem like fish, gulping in air to no good purpose. Just like the good peasantry of Derbyshire who know their place.

I hear (Bernie) Sanders describing some symptoms of this new American condition, but it is done with no sense of secular rage; no sense of directed resentment. He blames 'Wall Street'. He avoids the blame being directed at any individual or group of individuals. How gently American and how polite, to avert the eyes from the villains who can be seen in plain sight. In Europe, the hatred is directed, personal, always potentially violent. In America the criticisms are aimed at structures, so as to offer an institutional set of solutions. Britain was once like this. it preferred institutional strength to personal strife.

Here in Europe, we prefer the knife, the bullet, the camp, the stiletto.

Trump, the talented emotional manipulator, as well as arch globalising financial operator using property as chips, suggests to the economically disenfranchised that he will pump up the nation to 'greatness' again, and they will all become 'winners'. Vast numbers of 'fellow Americans' seem to love this rhetoric. 

Ever mischievous, Terry sports his 'Make America Great Again' cap.

Suggest to an working-class Englishman that being a winner is desirable or even possible and a laugh of bitter disengagement will result. Suggest it to the ruling rich and they will say nothing, since that is all that they know anyway. In Britain, the Trump figure is (Labour Party leader) Corbyn, but he blames groups of real people. He is a communist and his solutions would very probably result in smooth skinned folk finding they had holes in the back of their heads.

That is the common thread running through both continents; the people behave as though changes have not happened. but when they see danger, whilst one people looks to a solution of social engagement, the other to the killing of one's enemies. England is moving closer to the continental violence it avoided for so long. Why?

Aristocracy is replaced with a degenerate universal franchise, and representative government is being rapidly replaced with the calamity of private interest groups and personal greed (with the attendant corruption) on a scale this writer would have not believed possible.

The choice of location?

It has to be America. The donuts are better there. - Terry Field

Comments, ever welcome, may be made to glennhistory@gmail.com.

From a cousin in Alabama....

Very interesting, and remarkably right on target in many aspects, and I really like his writing style. By the way, it did  go well with my morning cup(s) of inspiration. Thanks, Glenn. 

From a retired pastor in Tennessee....

Thank you ... will go for the cup of coffee and find an easy chair.

From England, south of Heathrow...an American expatriate....

Hi Glenn,

Thanks for sending.  I hate generalisations because they rarely hold water.  Too many exceptions easily found.  I'd love to read what he thinks about the French!  

From the Australian biographer of Tom Price....

One day I’d like to meet this Terry. He has views so much like my own, but I’d very much like his powers of expression!

Thanks so much for sharing Terry’s views with me.

 PS -  parrot pix to brighten your day. I love the movement and colour.

       

P.S. - One of your bloggers has a go at Terry Field about generalising. I do shudder at statements uttered by one dimensional people who blithely declare that ‘all politicians are lazy and greedy’ or ‘all nuclear is evil’. However, I’ve observed that Terry is careful to back up his generalisations with examples and to note exceptions. Would Terry’s critic never have said something like “The German people, in general, are meticulous and methodical’? What is wrong with that remark? Is that false? When we notice a tendency about a race or religion or culture, it’s not a sin to note that tendency. It’s how we generalise which matters.